While many liberal blogs were celebrating what looked on the surface to be an Obama victory of raising taxes on the über wealthy, they apparently did not notice what was being slipped up their behind.

For starters, the payroll tax, which was lowered in 2011 from 6.2% down to 4.2% in an effort to breathe some life into a moribund middle class, has jumped back up by 2% to its original rate. 160 million American workers will now shell out another $35 to $180 per week depending on their income level. The payroll tax is capped for incomes greater than $113,000 at $2,274. This means that it’s a regressive tax –anyone making over $113,00 will pay less as a percentage of their income, while for everyone else the tax is a net increase of 2%.

The “fiscal cliff” legislation passed this week included $76 billion in special-interest tax credits for the likes of General Electric, Hollywood and even Captain Morgan. But these subsidies weren’t the fruit of eleventh-hour lobbying conducted on the cliff’s edge — they were crafted back in August in a Senate committee, and they sat dormant until the White House reportedly insisted on them this week…

In late July, Finance Chairman Max Baucus announced the committee would soon convene to craft a bill extending many expiring tax credits. This attracted lobbyists like a raw steak attracts wolves. …

General Electric and Citigroup, for instance, hired Breaux and Lott to extend a tax provision that allows multinational corporations to defer U.S. taxes by moving profits into offshore financial subsidiaries. This provision — known as the “active financing exception” — is the main tool GE uses to avoid nearly all U.S. corporate income tax.

As part of the fiscal cliff deal, Congress also extended another little-known tax break that benefits large multinationals selling products through overseas affiliates. This “pass-through” exemption permits a U.S.-based company to set up a new corporation in a tax haven like the Cayman Islands and sell it a patent owned by the U.S. parent company. Royalties on overseas licensing of that patent would then route to the tax-sheltered firm, instead of the U.S. parent company. The Joint Committee on Taxation says the two-year cost of extending this shelter is $1.5 billion.

The financial services industry, whose leaders had earlier joined a group of other corporate executives pushing for a “fair” solution to the fiscal crisis, is one of the primary beneficiaries of special-interest tax breaks. The active-financing exception, for example, permits banks like Morgan Stanley to avoid the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate on interest income from money lent overseas. A handful of other U.S.-based multinational companies with financing arms, such as Ford Motor Co. and General Electric, also use that exemption to lower their tax bills…

…[T]he “active financing” exception … permits businesses earning interest on overseas lending to defer U.S. taxes on that income indefinitely…

Vampire-squid Goldman Sachs and too-crooked-to-fail Bank of America also get tax breaks for moving into the new World Trade Center that replaced the pre-9/11 one:

…This tax provision was created to help revitalize Lower Manhattan’s small businesses but instead helped out these two mega-bailed-out banks and helped to subsidize the construction of luxury apartments. Goldman Sachs alone was reported to have received $1.6 billion in tax-free financing of its new building…

There are many more corporate giveaways in the fiscal spiked dildo that was rammed into Main Street, but you get the idea. America is just one big plantation for our corporate masters to harvest from on a perpetual basis. Yves Smith has a post discussing the permanent cementing-in of a class structure composed of the ‘have all’ and ‘have nothing’:

…The newest chat, with economist James Henry, focuses on how the deal on estate taxes allows the rich to pass on wealth to their children, allowing inequality to persist across generations. And he reminds us that a lot of Congressmen are rich enough that this provision will benefit their families…

In their mad dash to cling to a sinking ship’s last remaining point above water, the callus elite won’t hesitate to trample all over women and children. In a world of ‘peak everything’ and a dying biosphere, the venal nature of man will surely surface in spades.

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About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

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21 thoughts on “The Fiscal Spiked Dildo”

Well…yeah. But has it ever been anything different? Isn’t is just that our burgeoning population has grown so much? It doesn’t seem to me that the Aztecs, or the Romans, or the Imperial Japanese or the Egyptians or Vikings or antebellum South or Chinese Mandarins or Incas or French Royalty were any better…they just had less to work with. Now, the empire is global, we can’t restrain ourselves – and the collapse will be global. Blaming capitalism is so provincial. It’s not any one system – it’s human nature, unfortunately.

Xraymike, with all due respect for your prodigious talents (I mean that sincerely) you have drawn a conclusion that is absurd. I never said anything like “roll over and allow the corporate state free reign”. In fact if you know anything about me you would know I do anything but. I have to go back to NYC for court on the 16th for the FIFTH time fighting those asshole homeland security/police (they are now indistinguishable) and due to my political activities I fear when the inevitable crackdown comes, if I’m still alive, I’ll be in the vanguard of FEMA camp membership.

However, my point was, I do think it’s worthwhile to understand that capitalism as evil as it is, isn’t the root problem. The horrible exploitation of the environment and of lower classes has been going on for thousands of years, across cultures all over the world. So to me the question is, have we made any progress in decency or have we just figured out more sophisticated methods to practice the same sort of inequality (slavery, indentured servitude) and abuse also of the ecosystem (species extinction and habitat destruction and pollution)?

The question is: Are humans sustainable?
Those practicing industrial capitalism and a consumer culture are not.
Would it be possible to live sustainably under a system which was not legally bound to put financial interests above all else? I think we would have a much better chance at long term survival if that were not the case.

Name me a human culture that has been in balance – in perpetuity – with the ecological limits that surround it – without some horrific (by modern standards) population check. You know, infanticide or cannibalism or warfare. Maybe there is/was one. I just haven’t found it yet.

As far as I can tell we are effectively mindless consumers that are just too smart for our own good, although it’s been a great 10,000 or so year ride for the elite.

The solution may lie in what has already been written, that sublime, unseemly preamble to the Most Dangerous Book Ever Written:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”

Millions died in vain, in misplaced attempts to bring an end to this struggle through protest, through revolution, and through war. They did so because they understood the spectre of Capitalism was only the most recent part of a multi-century continuum of exploitation, the very core of which was class struggle. From pre-capitalist hunter-gatherer tribes to feudal lords and vassals, and all societies in between, there is strong evidence that class struggle and it’s first cousin of exploitation have root cause contributions. There is evidence that tribes and societies that did master effective class consciousness thrived, for a very long time. Those that didn’t, don’t.

It is not good form to admit to having read this book (link below). It is even poorer form to acknowledge its truth, it striking relevance nearly 150 years after the fact. The contemporary experts on these theories spend a great deal of time discussing family relations, social relations, relations with the environment, and the dialectic that couples these disparate connections. They do so because they understand that before a political economy, Capitalist or otherwise, there are social relations, elemental matters such as natural law and property ownership to be determined, the distribution of surplus value within a family, to a child, to an elder to be settled with equity.

Improper and mal-formed predecessor doctrine such as Natural Law, property ownership, and distribution of surplus are the touchstones of a failed (and failing) society.

Yes, every society will eventually self destruct. Every finite resource will ultimately be depleted. And every one of us will die someday.

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

For example:
The Inuit civilization has persisted ever since they crossed the Bering Strait.
The Australian Aborigines have been around for some 40,000 years.

Civilizations and empires come and go, but they have never made the entire planet uninhabitable. The Industrial Age, the Green Revolution, and advances in medicine and technology allowed the human population to explode. But all of this was underwritten by one thing – fossil fuels.

That energy coupled with industrial capitalism and corporate consumerism is what has lead us to this point of ecological overshoot and the impending global collapse of the Earth’s biosphere.

So yes, you cannot ignore a civilization’s socio-economic system and just say that collapse is inevitable and humans are unsustainable due to “human nature”.

Yes, I can and do say collapse is inevitable, and it’s due to human nature. The only question ever was not whether, but when. See Mathus – and the legends of Pandora’s Box, and Prometheus, all prophetic.

Agreed, I would go further – climate change doesn’t THREATEN to do but WILL DO AND IS DOING. Climate change is always followed by mass extinction. It has to do with disruption of the complex relationships that develop through millions of years of evolution.

However, as I wrote today at J Romm’s blog:

There is a dreadful fragmentation and paralysis [among activists] however, climate change is only one symptom of deeper problems. If you waved a magic wand and made climate change go away, the human race – or at least industrial civilization – would still be dooming itself by overpopulation, over-extraction of non-renewable resources (including fuels and fish), habitat destruction, and devastating pollution, which is fast poisoning the air, water and soil beyond reclamation. Not to mention no one has a plan to deal with all the nuclear waste we continue to create.

Well xraymike79, that is an excellent question. Something that is being struggled with at Guy McPherson’s blog constantly.

For myself, I can only compare it to receiving a diagnosis from a doctor that I have inoperable, untreatable pancreatic cancer. What should be my response to that?

Finding quacks that will tell me it’s not true? And if I eat some sort of wild berries I can cure it? Or maybe I should be tempted to just say, fuck it, I’ll have some sort of wild party to the end?

What if I realize my diagnosis is that of so many others sooner or later?

My response – and I don’t say this because I think I’m a particularly special or wonderful person – is just to live out the rest of my life being as kind and forgiving and understanding as I can to others, including myself.

Worst, an ongoing struggle to forgive myself for bringing innocent children into what is sure to be a morass similar to Mad Max, with little hope they will die of peaceful old age.

I don’t think we can escape our fate. I should add, that’s after much agonizing, wishing and turmoil.

It’s the right thing to do Collectively, we are all dumb. Most people as a group are stupid and oblivious and deluded. Then there are those few who have courage…and then there are those that are evil and wicked.

If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts – the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) – as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of
the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.

In fact, even inverted, Borges’s fable is unusable. Only the allegory of the Empire, perhaps, remains. Because it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction. Because it is difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This imaginary of representation, which simultaneously culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographers mad project of the ideal coextensivity of map and territory, disappears in the simulation whose operation is nuclear and genetic, no longer at all specular or discursive. It is all of metaphysics that is lost. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

Milan Kundera – Immortality (1991) page 126

Some one hundred years ago in Russia, persecuted Marxists began to gather secretly in small circles in order to study Marx’s manifesto; they simplified the contents of this simple ideology in order to disseminate it to other circles, whose members, simplifying further and further this simplification of the simple, kept passing it on and on, so that when Marxism became known and powerful on the whole planet all that was left of it was a collection of six or seven slogans, so poorly linked that it can hardly be called an ideology. And precisely because the remnants of Marx no longer form any logical system of ideas, but only a series of suggestive images and slogans (a smiling worker with a hammer, black, white, and yellow men fraternally holding hands, the dove of peace rising in the sky, and so on and so on), we can rightfully talk of a gradual, general, planetary transformation of ideology into imagology.

Marha Gellhorn in an interview in 1983:

If the poor – either as in Spain – defended themselves or – as in Vietnam and Salvador – finally make efforts on their own behalf, then they’re automatically considered communist. And that’s most fascinating because this is giving to communism the right to be the soul custodian of social justice.

Which it really is not.

But, our side always puts it in this position.

We did it in Vietnam, we’re doing it in Salvador, and we did it in Spain – and Spain decided that a republic was reds.

In fact, the republic – which had been legally elected – was, if you will, the side of the poor; the majority of the people – and its desire was social reform and social justice – so then it’s called red.

As if only reds care about social justice.

Exactly the same thing in Vietnam.

The Vietcong is red etc etc was red.

But, the Vietcong was opposed to absentee landlords – a totally unfair system of running a country – same as in Salvador.

So the poor are always called reds, and reds then become people who are in favour of social justice.

Is this what it is to become worldly and knowledgeable – to quote of people of whom we’ve never met and hold dear – to others of whom we’ve never met, so as to feel better of ourselves?

To Chris Hedges, who taught Howard Zinn’s ‘History of the United States’ to a penal holiday camp captive audience, yet had never met Zinn – who couldn’t even hold a candle upto Hedges when he were alive, to say that he ever even knew of him?

Should I even shunt Jean Baudrillard into our midst – a man dead five years before I ever knew of him – for fear I recognise I’m not using his mind and word’ to enlighten the flock, but really as a heavy damaging hammer?

Is Kundera due a book report – he’s hanging in at 83 – or what of Gellhorn – gone these past 14 years to suicide at 79 – or the irrascible Vidal – bearly in the ground a year – who none of which knew of me anymore than of a number of the flock who swallow the media pap, castrated into servitude by corporate focus groups supportive of politicians to smooth the next collamity onto our country’s military slaying – innocent victims as “collateral damage” – so as to keep the lights on in the toilet blocks of the state at night with none about to benefit?

What is it that we’re supposed to do, measure each others dicks?

Does Wendy still count without one?

We review one another, isn’t that the point?

We recognise the symptoms, and we atone to the privilege – to the pain sort through such knowledge of these dead hero’, and give back something of what it took to learn of them! – by them, for them – and also a duty to ourselves and to others!

Isn’t that why we’re here?

To teach and expand minds?

To band-aid a bridge between ignorance and knowledge?

And when we fellow seals fall off of our balls mid-performance, shouldn’t there be a flock of helping hands to pick us up.

How right or certain we are – what does it matter for all that learning if the valueless returns are no better than your own echo bouncing back from four shrinking walls?

O’Bomber is a sham, everything he’s done having to do with the economy or national security is pretty much par for the course. an all-inclusive fascist oligarchy is still a fascist oligarchy.
Marx concentrated the Manifesto on industrial society because that’s what he, and we, are/were dealing with. the first paragraphs state the reality of class struggle since time immemorial. exploitation is exploitation, it’s all about surplus, profit if you will and exploiting people and nature to get it.
people want to cal it greed, fine, it’s just struggle, if i have food and you don’t? you die. nice write up.

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